Protect the Pope has avoided posting on the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar, a 31 year-old Indian woman who died October 28th of septicaemia, a severe systemic inflammatory infection, after she was admitted to hospital while miscarrying. It is difficult to imagine the grief of her husband and family, coping with the death of both mother and child.

However, evidence has emerged of the lengths the pro-abortionists in Ireland have exploited and manipulated this tragedy to force the legalisation of abortion.

LifeSite news reports:

A leaked e-mail, dated Sunday, November 11, indicates that the Irish Choice Network had been given prior knowledge of the case, days before it hit the media, though by whom is as yet uncertain. The Irish Times did not break the story publicly until November 14th, running the headline, “Woman ‘denied a termination’ dies in hospital”.

The e-mail advised ICN followers that “a major news story in relation to abortion access is going to break in the media early this coming week,” and said the news would be the basis of a prearranged protest calling for abortion outside the Dáil on Wednesday. The e-mail asked members to attend a meeting of the Irish Choice Network when they would have “more definite information around which we can make some collective decisions about how best to proceed.”

“Apologies if this is all a little mysterious, but the reason why I didn’t want to put specific details down by e-mail will probably be clear tomorrow,” it continued.

The e-mail, Uí Bhriain said, showed clearly that abortion advocates have deliberately exploited the case to start a campaign to have abortion legalised in Ireland. She said that serious questions now needed to be asked. “The media and the HSE [Health Services Executive] now needs to ask why this information seems to have been given in advance to abortion advocates,” she added.
“Was it given to them by the Irish Times, or by someone in the HSE? And if so, why?” she asked. She noted that the Irish Times story was written by Kitty Holland, daughter of leading abortion advocate Eamonn McCann.

“As we await the investigation in to what happened in Galway hospital, we need to know why this private patient information was given to campaigners for legalised abortion in Ireland,” she said.

Protect the Pope comment: It is obvious that members of Enda Kenny’s government, the HSE and sections of the media are determined to legalise abortion. The exploitation of Savita’s death to attain this goal reveals in all its ugliness the ruthlessness of the pro-abortion propaganda machine. Images of Irish pro-abortionists protesting outside the Dail on the day the media broke the news of Savita’s death was a pre-arranged plan to manipulate public opinion in Ireland before the facts of her death had been determined.

Even Ireland’s Minister for Health, James Reilly, who is not pro-life, has raised questions about the exploitation of this tragic case, saying he does not believe the claims that the doctors told Mr. Halappanavar that abortion was not available because Ireland is a Catholic country. He added that no decisions can be made until a medical investigation is completed.

I think we need a really sensible approach to this tragic case. It was wrong of the pro-abortion movement to exploit it at a time when we do not even now know all the facts of the case. It is also wrong to accuse the Clinicians of negligence for the same reason.
But why choose a well known pro-abortionist to head the inquiry ? Imagine the uproar had someone who is pro-life been chosen?
Finally, it is only right to note that the maternal death rate per 100,000 is 5.7 in Ireland. In the UK it is 12. In India it is 253.8

This was very obviously coordinated from the beginning. In Ireland, the pro-abortionists and their groups, and organisations that they control, including the main Media outlets, are well-known. Various print and broadcast Media people who purport to be “journalists” are closely involved with pro-abortion politicians and NGO or public organisations’ officials, and other lobbyists to try to subvert the Constitution and laws relating to the defence of life, and get abortion legalised any way they can. The case has been driven by certain Media organisations according to a strident pro-abortion agenda from the outset. The international Media took the bait and ran with it because it was easy CBS suited their ideological bias. The truth was jettisoned at the start before the story was “broken”; the story was carefully misrepresented over and over, with carefully organised hysteria and practised shock, and the continual intertwining of abortion with the case, and moreover the the case with the absurd and notoriously erroneous “X case” judgment by the SC in 1992. Very few rational voices are allowed access to the Media, their letters not published, etc. It is all breathtakingly obvious, but many people whose only source of information is what the pro-abortion propagandists of the Media choose to present them, many are easily swayed. Please pray for Ireland. Thank you.

The hijacking by pro abortion activists of this poor woman’s death and her baby to promote abortion legalisation is reprehensible because this issue has nothing to with abortion as this says:

In a piece in the Irish Independent, Galway lawyer Eilís Mulroy confirms that “The decision to induce labour early would be fully in compliance with the law and the current guidelines set out for doctors by the Irish Medical Council. Those guidelines allow interventions to treat women where necessary, even if that treatment indirectly results in the death to the baby. If they aren’t being followed, laws about abortion won’t change that. The issue then becomes about medical protocols being followed in hospitals and not about the absence of legal abortion in Ireland.”

Savita: nothing in Catholic teaching prevented action to save her life

Ireland has one of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world. Maternal mortality rates are higher in England, Wales and Scotland where abortion is legal, compared to Ireland. Breast cancer, suciide and other disorders are lower in Ireland than in England, Wales and Scotland and Ireland has a higher fertility rate

At the time of the announcement of the sad death of Ms Halappanavar the UK press all seemed to carry the same story without any individual investigative journalism pointing to a single news agency as source.

Reports of the post mortem of Ms Halappanavar ascribed E.coli ESBL as the cause of death. I am unaware of any post mortem reports as the cause of the death of the baby.

The time line to the death of Ms Halappanavar extracted from The Irish Times is given below.

Sunday 21 October Admitted to hospital with back pain. Given internal examination “ The doctor told us the cervix was fully dilated, amniotic fluid was leaking”

Tuesday 23 October “That evening she developed shakes and shivering and she was vomiting. She went to use the toilet and she collapsed. There were big alarms and a doctor took bloods and started her on antibiotics.”

Wednesday 24 October At lunchtime the foetal heart had stopped and Ms Halappanavar was brought to theatre to have the womb contents removed. “When she came out she was talking okay but she was very sick. That’s the last time I spoke to her.”
At 11 pm he got a call from the hospital. “They said they were shifting her to intensive care. Her heart and pulse were low, her temperature was high. She was sedated and critical but stable

Friday 26 October reported stable

Saturday 27 October by 7pm on Saturday they said her heart, kidneys and liver weren’t functioning. She was critically ill. That night, we lost her.”

Perhaps the best comment I have read on this matter was “abortion doesn’t cure septicaemia”. I think that’s true. Certainly, in all the comments I have heard, nobody has attempted to explain what good an abortion would have done for the mother.

I am not a medic but I wonder whether any surgical intervention, including an abortion, is to be avoided when someone has acute septicaemia such as ESBL inducing E.Coli? Once the baby had died I presume that it was essential to remove it but I wonder whether that surgical intervention was not an unavoidable factor in her eventual death. Very sad.

Purely from the point of preventing infection and if we were to assume that this was the only consideration, the contents of the womb should be removed as soon as possible. They are the source of the infection, the “food” that the bugs are feeding on. It is a distasteful I know, but once you have a fetus or any other tissue inside you which is rotting, then all the antibiotics in the world can’t save you, it needs to come out – surgically or by induction of labour which you can do with a hormone injection.

The same applies to normal pregnancies, the membranes keep the baby sterile, but as soon as your waters break (as they do when normal delivery starts or if you are having a miscarriage), the baby needs to come out within a relatively short space of time (24 hours as a rule of thumb) for the sake of the baby and the mother.

The doctors did everything right to save this woman’s life. The problem is that they did it too late because they appeared to be waiting for the baby’s heartbeat to stop.

Eric: You say that the unborn baby was the source of the infection. I do not think we know that. The infection may well have had another source preceding any problem with the baby. Until we know more we cannot come to any certain judgement.

“nobody has attempted to explain what good an abortion would have done for the mother.”

simple. It would have removed the rotting contents of the womb which were putting poisons into Savita’s bloodstream. Analogous from an infection piont of view to treating sepiceamia by removing an infected appendix or pulling out a rotting tooth or cutting off a rotten leg. Morally, I know that my analogy is highly distasteful, but E. coli is not a moral agent.

It would be entirely speculative to suggest that the baby was the cause of the infection.

For any baby to be infected with E.coli ESBL that did not originate via the mother could only have originated from a prenatal intervention.

The words of Blessed Pope John Paul II might also be noted in passing. [1]
14…Prenatal diagnosis, which presents no moral objections if carried out in order to identify the medical treatment which may be needed by the child in the womb, all too often becomes an opportunity for proposing and procuring an abortion. This is eugenic abortion, justified in public opinion on the basis of a mentality-mistakenly held to be consistent with the demands of “therapeutic interventions”-which accepts life only under certain conditions and rejects it when it is affected by any limitation, handicap or illness.”

“For any baby to be infected with E.coli ESBL that did not originate via the mother could only have originated from a prenatal intervention.”

not sure that is correct. The word “only” in your sentance certainly isn’t right.

An infection can enter via a prenatal intervention (for example one carried out for pre-natal diagnosis), but without intevention its entry is also pretty much enevitable once the protective membranes have ruptured. They will be ruptured at or shortly before healthy delivery (“waters breacking”) or during a miscarriage.

The baby girl’s body was removed as soon as she died. Her mother had the infection some time before that. In fact, the physical trauma of removing the baby and placenta is a risk for spreading the infection. According to experts, this action could hasten the death of the mother. The strain of E Coli is a rare one and was likely contracted while travelling. On suicide, women carrying a child are much less likely to commit suicide than women in general. If a person is in danger of suicide, she should get the psychiatric treatment, care and supervision required. Killing her innocent child is not just, nor is it in the interests of the mother, who will likely be very relieved when baby is born. I’ve met many women who were saved from having their children killed in utero, and they are always grateful that their children were saved.

Ireland has a much better maternal survival rates than the UK and better than almost every other country. They can be pround of that and it is my suspecion that the fact that Ireland is a Catholic country with a strong beliefs about family and children is not unconected to that fact (although the other countries with extremely good rates include Catholic Spain, secular Norway and Sweden and Islamic Kuwait, so the picture is not completely straightforward).

Danish study reviewed medical records for 1st pregnancies for nearly 500000 women between 1980 and 2004. Researchers focused on maternal mortality with 1st pregnancy only. They compared records to abortion register and death register. They found women who gave birth had lower mortality preganncy associated rates than women who had later or early abortion from time measures, 180 days to 10 years. Rsearchers found abortions take that place before 12 weeks had a 80% higher risk of mortality in 1st year, 40% higher risk over 10 year: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-studies-report-higher-death-rates-after-abortion-in-us-finland-and-denmark-168595636.html

Is he the one that believes in climate change which has is far from proven and scientists are not in agreement on if it is real, what the cause is. I think he needs to rename his book, he is the one that believes in ‘bad science’